I read Greek for two reasons, firstly for professional purposes and secondly for personal pleasure. When it comes to pleasure, I constantly turn to the ‘old’ favourites, to Homer, Herodotus, tragedy and, more surprisingly perhaps, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns. A continuing interest in Hesiod is easily explained: it so happened that when I went up to University College London in the Fall of 1949, I commenced my studies by attending a course of lectures on Hesiod's Works and Days and these were delivered by the most exciting teacher in the Classics Department, T.B.L. – Tom – Webster. The impression made by the lectures was so great that I found myself, and still find myself, enthralled by the poet from Boeotia. An enthusiasm for the Homeric Hymns came later; it is not the fact that I enjoy the hymns that others seem to regard as a little eccentric but my strong preference for the Hymn to Aphrodite. Is this, I can feel colleagues wondering, a consequence of the contemporary craze for ‘Women's Studies’ even among – or is it especially among – classicists? Let me hastily assure you that it is not: I enjoy the Hymn to Aphrodite because of what I believe to be its outstanding literary qualities, and these are qualities that have been increasingly acknowledged in the last dozen or so years.

In Oedipus Tyrannus the other characters regularly call Oedipus ‘tyrannos’. My question is what we should call him. Etymologically the obvious translation is tyrant. But the word tyrant suggests a wickedness of heart, or at any rate a total disregard for the wishes of others, that is far from characteristic of the Oedipus that Sophocles portrays. Moreover Oedipus was elected ‘tyrannos’ and refers to his post as ‘tyrannis’. These are two further obstacles since no-one purposely chooses a tyrant to rule over them and in English tyrantship is not a plausible name for a government office. For these reasons – or so one imagines – translators and commentators avoid the etymological derivative. But they do not pursue the logic of usage to the point of adopting any of the standard modern terms for an elected head of state such as president. Instead the title they confer on Oedipus, virtually without exception, is king.

In recent years a considerable literature on the scope and meaning of the word hubris has done much to clarify the nature of this important concept. However, some important aspects of hubris deserve more detailed attention. In particular, a full account of the social context and moral psychology of the ideology, social practices, and legal prosecutions involving hubris would make a fundamental contribution to our understanding of Athenian society and the role which litigation played in moderating or exacerbating social conflicts. Indeed, such an account, particularly if it drew upon recent advances in the social anthropology of agonistic societies, would necessarily increase our appreciation of the centrality of hubris and the related values of honour and shame in Athenian social relations. While the goals of the present study are far more modest, in a sense they represent a first step in this direction. Since, as I will argue, the relation of the law of hubris to certain kinds of sexual misconduct and to sexual aspects of honour and shame has not been fully recognized, an exploration of this relation may help to mark out some of the ground which a fuller treatment would have to cover.

What did Athenians think about when they talked about ‘the poor’? The question is worth asking for two reasons: first, if we are to judge from our texts, the Athenians talked a good deal about ‘the poor’, and it will help our understanding of these texts to know something about the presuppositions which author and audience had about ‘the poor’; and second, since the way a society stereotypes its members tells us something about that society, a study of Athenian presuppositions about ‘the poor’ should provide a further insight into Athenian social relations. In what follows I do not mean to suggest that all Athenians shared these presuppositions, any more than we share the stereotypes of poverty common today. Whatever individual Athenians may have believed, however, the assumptions to be considered here were a part of the landscape of Athenian public discourse, as it were, and so had to be taken into account when Athenians talked about ‘the poor’. Finally by way of preface I should also add that the present study deals, as its title says, with only some Athenian presuppositions about ‘the poor’. In particular, I do not consider here the large group of texts which, making a virtue of necessity, praise the poor for not succumbing to the vices (especially hubris) typical of the rich.

It was a natural and well-established usage in antiquity that works of literature might readily be referred to by their opening words. Aristophanes accidentally lends the ‘Παλλάδα περсέέολιν δεινάν …. ’ ‘Pallas the awful city-sacker …’ of a certain Lamprocles or maybe of Stesichorus and the ‘Τηλέπορον τι βόαμα …’, ‘Some far-reaching shriek …’ of one ‘Kydidas’ a pale and partial immortality this way (Nub.967), and in the imaginary world of Theocritus an imaginary poem the ‘τὸν ἐμὸν Λύκον….’ ‘Lycus my lover…’ by an imaginary ‘Larisaean fellow’ is thus evoked (Id. 14.30). Cicero refers to Ennius' Medea as the ‘Vtinam ne in nemore….’ (Fin. 1.5), and we even find him casually referring to an evidently near-definitive draft of his Cato maior de senectute which he had sent to Atticus as the ‘O Tite si quid …’ (Att.16.3.1) and ‘O Tite …’ 9 Att. 16.11.3): here an opening citation of a citation (of Ennius) is identifying the book, clearly doubly unsuitable as an official title; as if for Atticus the publisher and his clerks in the scriptorium this was a normal practice, mechanically applicable regardless of appositeness. In one of the less gloomy passages in Tristia (2.261) Ovid has a girl broaching Lucretius in not quite the right spirit: sumpserit ‘Aeneadum genetrix …’ ubi pritna, requiret Aeneadum genetrix unde sit alma Venus, and further on (2.534) alludes to the Aeneid in the same way: contulit in Tyrios arma uirumque toros; cf. Persius 1.96 ‘arma uirum’, nonne hoc spumosum etcorticepingui utramale uetus uegrandi subere coctum?, Martial 14.185 accipe facundi Culicem, studiose, Maronis, ne nucibus positis arma uirumque legas. Virgil himself had alluded in the closing signature to the Georgics to his own Bucolica with Tityre, tepatulae cecini sub tegmine fagi (G. 4.566); Ovid elaborates on that at Amores 1.15.25 Tityrus etfruges Aeneiaque arma, though without wanting just mechanically to insist specifically on first line allusions; after all, he could have written segetes instead of fruges in recollection of Ge orgies 1.1. Lastly in this little survey, which is merely illustrative, there is the point that it seems to have been standard Alexandrian practice in cataloguing works to refer, e.g., to ‘The Brothers of X of which the first line is …’, ‘The Phoenissae of Y, the first line of which is …’, presumably to resolve potential ambiguities within and between the canons of particular authors.

The indebtedness of the Aeneid to Homer in terms of plot and structure has been analysed in minute detail, and the hunt is indeed by no means at an end. Here and there, notably but not exclusively in Aeneid 4, long narrative sequences have been followed back to Apollonius Rhodius. Isolated episodes have been identified as owing much to Greek tragedy. But the pursuit of Virgil's principal narrative sources, already undertaken with furious critical acerbity in antiquity, is perhaps too heavily committed to a limited quantity of likely literary models and to certain patterns of enquiry, though these last have changed a good deal in recent years. If I seem to grumble about a narrowness of outlook that becomes at times oppressive and about the danger of conclusions ever more forced and improbable if we continue barking up the same few trees, it is because (i) I have worked on and off for nearly twenty-five years on Aeneid 7, where Virgil's sources are as mixed, complex and anomalous as they ever become and because (ii) I published recently a study (Vergilius 35 (1989), 8–27) of narrative sequences in Aeneid, which seemed to point strongly towards Virgil's attentive reading of Greek colonization stories. This is not the place to continue my one-man pursuit of Herodotus and Pindar in the Aeneid? but it is high time that we looked at certain large narrative structures in the epic and asked whether we have really been framing the right questions about them.

The theme of the building and destruction of cities is a conspicuous one in the Aeneid. The poem opens with a paragraph which summarizes the suffering that is to lead to the building of ‘the walls of lofty Rome’, and this passage is linked by verbal echoes to Aeneas' entry not much later when he bewails the fact that he has not died a heroic death beneath ‘the lofty walls of Troy’. The city which is to rise and the city which has fallen are in their very different ways inescapable features of the Aeneid's geography.

The advent of the video recorder and its rather belated legal recognition through licencing arrangements for off-air recording has opened up possibilities for the widespread use of the video in education. Not surprisingly the video revolution has encouraged the production of a wide range of films designed for (or purporting to be designed for) education, at all levels.